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A National Research Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure

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A National Research Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure A National Research Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure Elizabeth Mynatt Jennifer Clark Greg Hager Georgia Tech Georgia Tech Johns Hopkins University Computing Community Consortium Dan Lopresti Greg Morrisett Klara Nahrstedt Lehigh Univeristy Cornell University University of Illinois George Pappas Shwetak Patel Jennifer Rexford University of Pennsylvania University of Washington Princeton University Helen Wright Ben Zorn Computing Community Consortium Microsoft Research Our infrastructure touches the day-to-day life of each of our fellow citizens, and its capabilities, integrity and sustainability are crucial to the overall competitiveness and prosperity of our country. Unfortunately, the current state of U.S. infrastructure is not good: the American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest report on America’s infrastructure ranked it at a D+ — in need of $3.9 trillion in new investments. This dire situation constrains the growth of our economy, threatens our quality of life, and puts our global leadership at risk. The ASCE report called out three actions that need to be taken to address our infrastructure problem: 1) investment and planning in the system; 2) bold leadership by elected officials at the local and federal state; and 3) planning sustainability and resiliency in our infrastructure1. While our immediate infrastructure needs are critical, it would be shortsighted to simply replicate more of what we have today. By doing so, we miss the opportunity to create Intelligent Infrastructure that will provide the foundation for increased safety and resilience, improved efficiencies and civic services, and broader economic opportunities and job growth. Indeed, our challenge is to proactively engage the declining, incumbent national infrastructure system and not merely repair it, but to enhance it; to create an internationally competitive cyber-physical system that provides an immediate opportunity for better services for citizens and that acts as a platform for a 21st century, high-tech economy and beyond. Intelligent infrastructure is the deep embedding of sensing, computing, and communications capabilities into traditional urban and rural physical infrastructures such as roads, buildings, and bridges for the purpose of increasing efficiency, resiliency, and safety. For example, embedding controllers, intersection schedulers, and sensors along roads creates new capabilities to control traffic signals and optimize traffic flow. Developing intelligent power grids provides the means to provide new efficiencies in power generation and transmission, improved resilience to natural and human-originated disruptions, and streamlined integration of new energy sources such as wind. These are all examples of how intelligence infrastructure will change the way we interact with each other and how we plan and design our cities, towns, and communities. It is essential for us as a nation to invest in intelligent infrastructure and establish a coordinated research agenda to reap the benefits of this revolutionary change. Across disciplines ranging from engineering to computer science to public policy, intelligent infrastructures are increasingly seen as solutions to the long-standing problems that face local governments attempting to respond to both long term and short term threats to resilience: 1) strained resources spread across ever growing urban populations, 2) aging infrastructures and public services systems, 3) competitiveness in the global economy, and 4) acute human and environmental stressors due to rapid growth and change in regional areas. 1 http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ 1 The economic opportunity presented by intelligent infrastructure is three-fold. First, the data produced by intelligent infrastructure promises to increase the reliability of local government services and performance of infrastructure systems. For example, deep analysis of traffic patterns in connection with more intelligent traffic lights can significantly reduce traffic congestion on roadways, and smart meters can record consumption of electric energy and send that information back to a utility for monitoring and billing. The data also paves the way for building interoperable and cross platform systems that enable cross-system coordination, and that will ultimately allow localities to provide higher quality, expanded services, from waste management to emergency response to public health, at a lower cost. The second opportunity is that intelligent infrastructure investments can enhance and inform the strategic planning capacities of local communities—large and small—with real-world data on how infrastructure is used by citizens and businesses and how the infrastructure is performing. Local communities, businesses, and citizens will be able to see how their community is operating, and receive prescriptive recommendations and predictive insights to inform future investments, ranging from immediate actions to counter flooding risks, to proactively addressing increasing risks to public safety due to accidents, crime or natural disasters. Third, the sharing of data amongst smart community partners and participants helps to build networks for sharing policy strategies and technical approaches. These strategic partnerships form the foundation of economic opportunities that flow from far-reaching investments in intelligent infrastructure: entrepreneurship and market leadership. The data generated by and for smart community systems (and the systems that produce that data) form the foundation of new enterprises and new products and services and, as a consequence, function as platforms for further economic development. The Federal Government has an important role to play in shaping the scope and scale of intelligent infrastructure investments going forward. After World War II, as the nation’s infrastructure exploded to accommodate returning veterans and their families, the production of the Interstate Highway System began. This national project to invest in a critical grid system to cover our country revolutionized our nation. It forever changed how we transport our goods and services and it has allowed and contributed to the continued growth and expansion of our cities and towns. In short, the Federal Government will decide the platform on which the national economy is built going forward and whether it meets 20th century standards or sets a new standard for the 21st century economy. How to design and deploy intelligent infrastructure to efficiently and effectively support our communities is one of the central questions going forward for the country as a whole, and for local communities in specific. Federal action, like the Federal Aid Highway Act, is needed to start a national project of this scale. It is critical that we obtain this support now as we start thinking about the potential of intelligent infrastructure and all its possible impacts in our daily lives. 1.0 The Potential of Intelligent Infrastructure We define “Intelligent Infrastructure” as “the integrated sensing and data analytics with municipal capabilities and services that enable evidence-based operations and decision making” which is: - Descriptive: Provides an accurate and timely characterization of current state, e.g., water level in a storm drain or traffic congestion. - Prescriptive: Recommends immediate and near-term actions, e.g., re-routing traffic or dispatching onsite service personnel. - Predictive: Anticipate future challenges and opportunities, based on assessment of the current state, patterns of past activity and available resources and capabilities, e.g., street-level flooding by incorporating water sensors, weather patterns and runoff capabilities. - Proactive: Guides complex decision making and scenario planning, incorporating economic data, to inform future investment. Intelligent Infrastructure can incrementally increase operational performance and the ability to guide improvements through decision support. These “loops” or cycles of learning span automation and decision support to the eventual production of generalized knowledge. For example, advanced transportation systems could incrementally learn to manage different patterns of traffic, then provide decision support for managing special cases (e.g., disaster response), then support planning and prioritization for new road/control modifications, and finally 2 document generalized knowledge that can be applied across different cities with varying transportation capabilities. Intelligent Infrastructure has the potential to transform daily life and civic services across many configurations of municipal systems and services (see Table 1). Table 1: The Potential of Intelligent Infrastructure Across Multiple Domains Descriptive Prescriptive Predictive Proactive Intelligent Real time traffic Reroute traffic; Anticipate rush hour / Suggest traffic patterns Transportation congestion Adjust dynamic lane large event congestion; w/ intelligent information configuration Anticipate weather stoplights; road diet (direction, HOV) related accidents plan Intelligent Real time energy Improve asset Anticipate demand Suggest new market Energy demand information utilization and response required to approaches to integrate Management management across ensure grid reliability production and transmission and distribution capabilities distribution system Intelligent Real time crowd Threat detection; Anticipate vulnerable Suggest new Public Safety analysis Dispatch public settings and events communication and and Security safety officers coordination
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